Located in a downtown indoor shopping mall, Ski Dubai allows tourists a cool and refreshing escape from the desert heat. Michael MccarthyMichael Mccarthy

Only a short drive away from the metropolis, the rolling red sands of the desert offer wide open spaces to explore on safaris. Michael MccarthyMichael Mccarthy

The Emirates Air jet banks slowly over the Persian Gulf and the city comes into view, glistening glass towers twinkling in the dazzling sun. Row after row of immense structures emerge from the drifting desert sands, the setting for some sort of science fiction film.

I have seen the future, I think, and it looks a lot like Dubai.

Towering in their midst, its head lost in the clouds, stands the Burj Khalifa, at 828 metres (2,716 feet) and 160 storeys the tallest building in the world. Twenty years ago nothing stood here but sand and scrub. Today, in between all the immense towers, construction crews are busy building many more skyscrapers, the super-city of tomorrow. The next time you fill up your Cadillac Escalade and watch the dials at the pump, you’ll know where all your money has gone.

From the observation deck on the Khalifa’s 124th floor, 40-story skyscrapers way below look like pin pricks. Towers stretch for several kilometres, hotels and commerce and residential spaces interspersed with freeways, no structure seemingly more than a few years old. Everything is built on a scale difficult to comprehend, a fantastic Disneyland-on-steroids only one-tenth built and reaching for tomorrow.

Dubai is essentially the creation of Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister, Vice President of the United Arab Emirates of which Dubai is a part, and Dubai’s constitutional monarch. He is one of the richest men in the world, with a personal wealth of $4 billion. Unlike many other Gulf leaders busy building welfare states for their extended families, the Sheik has wisely poured Dubai’s vast oil wealth into planning well ahead for the future. Essentially he is constructing a global tourist mecca, one quickly evolving into a global centre of commerce.

I start my explorations at none of these. Instead, I attend a tour at the Sheik Mohammad Centre for Cultural Understanding, an educational experience that brings to life Arabic culture and history. Dubai, I learn over a tasty lunch, is only a hundred years old and until recently was a small fishing village.

There is not much left of the “old Dubai,” which was never a large city. In the old days (pre-oil) the economy was centred around pearl diving and the port, a natural saltwater creek that served as a safe haven for dhows (ships). I take a walking tour of the Bastakiya Heritage District, the Dubai Museum, and then an abra (water taxi) over the creek to the ancient gold and spice souks, the real heart of the city. The weather is very hot.

The souk’s shop windows are jammed with gold jewellry. Crime, I am told, is virtually non-existent in Dubai. In the searing mid-afternoon heat, apparently so are any tourists. The only place to be in this heat is relaxing in the chill of an air conditioned shopping mall. While browsing, why not try indoor skiing? Yes, Dubai boasts the world’s largest indoor ski hill, along with a hockey rink that wouldn’t be out of place in Edmonton. I ski and attempt indoor sky diving too. The Mall of the Emirates may be the biggest mall in the world.

While you could spend months exploring tourist activities, what you likely won’t find are many Emiratis. Locals make up only 15 percent of the population, and as the city population rapidly increases that number is dwindling. The vast majority of residents hail from other countries. My guide is from Venezuela and married to a German. The hotel manager is a Persian woman married to a Norwegian. There are huge Chinese and East Indian communities. I’m told there are lots of Canadians too, and even a hockey league packed with ex-pats that play on Friday nights. Vancouver and Toronto may be multicultural, I know, but nothing like Dubai.

According to TripAdvisor, the top tourist attraction in Dubai is the water fountain show, the dancing waters springing forth from the artificial lake outside the Burj Khalifa. The best place to watch the show, I find, is from the ground floor restaurant at the Palace Hotel, featuring an enormous buffet with the main culinary themes being Oriental, Asian, Spanish and Western. There may be something called Emirati food, but if there is I didn’t find it. Everything in Dubai is global.

The government’s decision to diversify from an oil-based economy and to make the city the number one tourist destination in the world has turned Dubai into the fastest growing metropolitan region in the world. Currently 30,000 construction cranes dot the landscape, meaning that over 25 percent of all cranes worldwide are currently operating in Dubai. Dozens of new multi-billion dollar construction projects are rapidly taking shape including the largest man-made marina in the world with 200 residential and hotel high rises. Just one new residential development, Jumeirah Lake Towers, comprises 79 skyscrapers. Dubai Business Bay will boast 240 new towers. Jebel Ali Village will house 500,000 new residents. The new airport will be the fourth largest in the world.

Dubailand will be world’s largest retail and entertainment centre, twice the size of Walt Disney World Resort, with 45 mega-projects and 200 sub-projects. In 2007, a $132 million extension of Dubai creek was finished and the new Arabian Canal will be the largest canal in the world. Upon completion Dubai Exhibition City will house the worlds longest single column-free exhibition hall.

The above list does not include Palm Jumeirah, the world’s largest man-made island full of villas and resorts, or The World, a planned artifical archipelago of hundreds of small islands to be constructed in the shape of a world map. Roughly 232 km of new shoreline is being created with development costs estimated at $14 billion Cdn.

There may be more 5-star hotels in Dubai than there are construction cranes. Dubai is home to the Burj Al-Arab, the world’s first “7-star” hotel, with a butler for every suite. As a guest of the government, I am whisked from one hotel to another to do site inspections, each hotel I visit vying for the title of best or most beautiful. Every hotel, I am also told, is full. Western celeberities are a dime a dozen in Dubai because privacy and personal safety are guaranteed. Terrorism is only the stuff of far away newspaper headlines. Here, everyone is either rich or too busy working to get rich to worry about Syria or Egypt.

The One and Only hotels, both The Mirage on the beach and The Palm Jumeirah, prove to be something out of the Arabian Nights, oases of luxury and serenity far away from the madness of downtown Dubai. At Atlantis on The Palm I am shown the 9-room Royal Suite that fetches 140,000 dirhams ($40,000 Cdn) per night. I must admit it has a very nice view, but I won’t be booking it soon.

Pinballing around Dubai’s expressways, I feel like a character in the middle of a futuristic video game. The population has soared from a few hundred thousand to two million people in a decade, and may hit 10 million before the current contsruction craze ends. Yet a simple 30-minute drive out to the desert brings the visitor back a thousand years, where camels still roam the blazing sands and Bedouin encampments provide nightly feasts replete with belly dancers and whirling dervishes.

Here, I am somehow convinced to experience an Emirati sport I don’t recommend for the faint-hearted. Dune bashing is where (air conditioned) Land Rovers are raced over enormous sand dunes in order to frighten terrified passengers out of their wits. What fun! Our ever-polite Emirati driver requests that passengers kindly open the doors and step outside if they need to recycle their lunch.

But as the giant orange fireball that is the Emirati sun sinks heavenly into a cobalt blue sky above an endless ocean of rust red sands rolling away to the Empty Quarter, and a huge feast of barbequed lamb is served on what must be the world’s largest outdoor carpet, the ultra-modern glass and steel air conditioned bubble that is Dubai is only a dream, a figment of some fantastically rich Arab sheik’s vision of the future. However, if you check your gas mileage at the pump on your next fill up, you may notice it’s a future that has already arrived.

If you go

Emirates Air flies daily out of Seattle and Toronto. The coolest temperatures in Dubai are from December to March. Highs at that time can reach up to 30C degrees and overnight lows of 15C, with an average daytime temperature of 24C.

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